Kenneth Pollack offers a sober, sobering look at the prospects for a nuclear-armed Iran

What makes difficult problems so difficult is that there are no good solutions to them. Case in point: What should we do about Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons?

As Kenneth Pollack observes in “Unthinkable” (Simon & Schuster, 528 pp., $30), his trenchant analysis of Iran, the bomb and American strategy, all the “choices are awful.” Nevertheless, “choose we must” – and in this case, it means trying to select the least bad option.

For more than a decade, the United States, along with its allies, has confronted an Iranian leadership seemingly bent upon acquiring nuclear weapons. To get them to give up their efforts, the United Nations and other bodies such as the European Union have imposed economic sanctions. There’s an active international inspection regime in the Islamic Republic.

Still, the Iranians persist. Absent some sort of agreement with the international community to stand down – and the chances look bleak – they will soon achieve what is known as a “breakout capability,” that is, the capacity to rapidly produce a nuclear weapon.

At that juncture, Pollack writes, we will have to decide “whether to contain a nuclear Iran or go to war as the final option to prevent one.”

Pollack, a former CIA analyst, is currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He’s a well-known expert who has written extensively on the Middle East and Iran. Then again, as he mordantly notes, given the opaque nature of the regime in Tehran, it’s “not hard to be an expert on Iran. You only need to know two phrases: ‘I don’t know’ and ‘it depends.’ ”

“Unthinkable” is well-organized and clearly written, although occasionally you feel the hot breath of PowerPoint on the back of your neck. It reads like an expanded version of what’s known in government circles as a policy or decision memo.

The book describes the problem and our desired outcome. It lays out what we know about Iran and its nuclear program. It makes assumptions to account for all we don’t know.

It presents possible courses of action, then analyzes and compares them. And it concludes with a recommendation. Inter alia, it also serves as an excellent primer on strategy itself – the matching of ways and means to achieve desired ends.

Pollack enumerates four options that still “hold some prospect of preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapons capability.”

These are “a revised version of the current carrot-and-stick” negotiating strategy; supporting regime change in Tehran; an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities; or an American attack.

While judging that none is likely to “succeed at an acceptable cost,” he also thinks that a combination of the first two has “enough promise to try.”

The administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have both employed the first approach. The “sticks” – economic sanctions – have inflicted considerable hardship on Iran, but to no avail. Pollack suggests offering “bigger carrots” and brandishing “bigger sticks” in an effort to reach a grand bargain with Iran.

In such a strategy, the international community would lift the sanctions, accept a limited Iranian nuclear program and offer security guarantees. In return, the Iranians would abandon pursuit of a rapid breakout capability and accept “intrusive UN inspections to assure” everyone they weren’t cheating.

Meanwhile, supporting “indigenous Iranian opposition groups” seeking to change or liberalize their government is “morally right . . . and a potentially useful adjunct” to this diplomatic avenue.

If diplomacy and regime change fail, then we are reduced to “going to war to prevent Iran from acquiring” nuclear capability “or else learning to live with it.”

Pollack is dead-set against preventive military action. He convincingly dismantles the “Sword of David” – an Israeli strike – as “the worst option.”

While the Israel Defense Forces are highly capable, they face daunting obstacles. These include airspace and range factors, ordnance and aircraft limitations, and Iranian hardening and dispersal of their nuclear facilities. He believes an Israeli operation has “a low probability of achieving even a short-term benefit and high probability of creating significant long-term problems.”

America’s military is much more powerful than Israel’s. Still, Pollack insists that even a massive U.S. air campaign would only set the Iranians back a couple of years before they reconstituted their nuclear program.

What then – play whac-a-mole with Iranian facilities? A ground invasion? Neither is remotely appealing. Pollack could have usefully quoted the Roman historian Livy here: “Nowhere do events correspond less to men’s expectations than in war.” Once you start down that path, you never know where it may lead.

“The world will not end the day after Iran acquires nuclear weapons,” Pollack asserts. If diplomacy fails, he advocates a policy of containment and nuclear deterrence toward Iran. His “reading of history” convinces him that these “are powerful concepts that have proven themselves reliable over time.”

Pollack argues compellingly for his choice of the “least bad” option. But even if he fails to persuade, he still renders a valuable service by forcing us to think rigorously about the unthinkable.

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